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My contributions
You pay minimum contributions of 4% of your pensionable salary into your personal account and so does NFU Mutual. However, if you pay more than the minimum, you can get increased contributions from NFU Mutual, who will double-match any additional contributions you make up to a maximum 12% of your pensionable salary. The table shows how this works out:
| You pay | NFU Mutual pays | Total paid into your personal account |
| 4% | 4% | 8% |
| 5% | 6% | 11% |
| 6% | 8% | 14% |
| 7% | 10% | 17% |
| 8% or more | 12% | 20% or more |
Am I saving enough?
The earlier you can begin saving more, the sooner you can start to benefit from the extra contributions from NFU Mutual.
Paying more into your personal account costs less than you think. You don’t have to pay tax on your pension contributions, which means that if you’re a basic-rate taxpayer, every £1 that you contribute actually only costs you 80p.
When you pay your contributions via SMART (which stands for Save Money and Reduce Tax), it gives you savings on National Insurance too, bringing the cost of contributing £1 down to 68p. Paying the SMART way is suitable for most people, but not all. If you’d like to know more about using SMART, please contact us.
Use our cost calculator to see how little it could cost you to increase your contribution rate.
Paying more
If you would like to increase your monthly contributions, you can do this by going to My Reward Hub. Any change you submit before the 25th of the month will take effect from the 1st of the following month.
Tax relief
You can save as much as you like into a pension, but the government limits the amount of tax relief that you can get on your contributions each year, as well as over the course of your lifetime.
Annual allowance
The annual allowance (AA) is a limit on the amount of tax-free contributions you can save each year. The standard AA is currently £60,000.
Your AA may be reduced and could be as low as £10,000 if you’re a high earner and have income from all sources over £200,000 a year.
Lifetime allowance
The lifetime allowance (LTA) is a limit on how much you can build up in a pension tax free over your lifetime and has been frozen at just over £1 million for some time. If you went over the limit, you had to pay a charge at retirement on the amount over the LTA of up to 55%. The government scrapped this tax charge from April 2023 and plans to get rid of the LTA entirely from next year – but this change still has to be passed into law.
Money purchase annual allowance
If you have flexibly accessed any DC pension savings, but you are continuing to save, the money purchase annual allowance will apply to you. It is currently £10,000.
These allowances won’t affect many employees. However, if you think you might save more than the AA each year or more than the LTA over your lifetime, you should speak to one of the NFU Mutual Staff Financial Advisers or consult an independent financial adviser.